Environmental News: Trump Administration Revises Need For Impact Statements

The Trump administration Thursday released revised environmental regulations exempting certain projects federal agency review, making it easier to expand airports, lay pipelines and build power plants.

The administration is narrowing the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental impact statements before a project can be started. The act requires federal agencies to assess the impact on the environment of such projects as airports, buildings, military complexes, highways and parkland purchases.

“It is important for our national economic prosperity and for the wellbeing of all our communities that these regulations be reformed,” the White House said.

The law has been used by various groups to block or delay numerous projects over the years, notably the Keystone XL and Dakota pipelines.

President Trump has complained the law “can increase costs, derail important projects and threaten jobs for American workers and labor union members.”

“The Trump administration is focused on improving the environmental review and permitting process while ensuring a safe, healthy, and productive environment for all Americans,” White House Council on Environmental Quality spokesman Daniel Schneider told the Washington Post in an email Thursday.

The new guidelines create a “nonmajor” federal actions category, allowing projects to move forward without federal assessment, and relieves federal agencies from considering climate change in its reviews, the New York Times reported. The regulation, however, does not set a dollar threshold.

The law was last updated in 1978.

Groups that have been railing against painstaking reviews, averaging five to seven years, hailed the changes, with the National Association of Manufacturers saying the changes are “exactly” what is needed and the American Exploration & Production Council saying it “removes bureaucratic barriers” that have hamstrung infrastructure improvements.

But environmentalists are unhappy.

“The whole idea of the law is to give better information in advance to decision-makers and the public. It appears that these changes are an effort to undermine both of those purposes of the statute,” Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife and oceans for the environmental firm Earthjustice, told the Post.

Federal agencies issue more than 10,000 environmental impact statements annually, some of which run as long as 600 pages.

Hilton Kelley, an activist in Port Arthur, Texas, told the Post by reducing the comprehensiveness of the review process, the administration “is doing a serious injustice to people living in industrial communities. It’s a matter of life and death.”

The changes are expected to be challenged in court. Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, told the Times the changes would not hold up in court and likely would lead to “far longer delays than if they [federal agencies] had done a proper analysis in the first place.”